Jack White with his three main current touring guitars, all of which were tweaked for or by White: (from left) a Gibson Jeff “Skunk” Baxter Fort Knox Firebird with a maple neck, an Ernie...
Jack White with his three main current touring guitars, all of which were tweaked for or by White: (from left) a Gibson Jeff “Skunk” Baxter Fort Knox Firebird with a maple neck, an Ernie Ball Music Man St. Vincent signature model with blue aluminum Lace Sensor pickups and an EVH Wolfgang with three humbuckers with anodized blue metal covers
Given Jack White’s well-documented obsession with the number three, it was a sure bet that his third solo album would be a genre-busting magnum opus. Boarding House Reach is all of that and then some—a cataclysmic mash-up that sets the disruptive cadences of EDM, hip-hop and musique concrete against White’s heart-on-sleeve, homespun core of blues, country, gospel, folk and, yes, rock and roll. As always, White’s woolly-mammoth guitar riffs and plaintive, edgy vocals anchor the proceedings. But Boarding House Reach is nonetheless a challenging disc. Then again, when has White been anything but challenging?
“This is probably the album that sounds most like how I was actually imagining these songs in my head,” says White. “I’ve attempted to do that on records in the past, but you get as close as you can and then say, ‘Well, that’s about as good as it’s gonna get. Time to move on.’ But this was more of a scenario of, ‘No, that’s not the right tone, or the right reverb. Let’s keep pushing till we get there.’ So I knew that was going to make the record a lot stranger. ’Cause I know my brain isn’t as simplistic as the songs I’ve put out in the past in my life.”
Now there’s an understatement. The disconnect between the simple lineaments of garage rock and the byzantine labyrinth of White’s hyperactive imagination is what fueled the White Stripes’ early